Slate gives a tutorial on one of my heroes.
From the piece...
What accounts for Martin's staying power? The answer emerges only when you stop trying to play pick-up sticks with his endeavors and instead focus on the direction they all point in. Martin is not chiefly a comic, or an actor, or a writer. He is a nostalgia artist. From the years of his first wild ascent, his signature has been to reach toward a lost cultural moment and remake it in his own time. The collision of those two worlds, past and present, gives his comedy its distinctive flavor. It also helps account for his success. Martin's nostalgia is, in fact, the broader cultural nostalgia of the late '70s; and it's only by tracing that era's effect on his style that you begin to see the pattern hidden in the multiform career.
Here he is on last night's Oscars:
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